New meals plan to fight the virus lockdown

Amongst the various first-world crises coronavirus has spawned for those of us who are lucky enough to be well I can now add food.

With all restaurants closed and delivery options seemingly limited to Indian, Chinese or pizza we’re getting a little tired of the food we cook ourselves.

For as long as we can remember we’ve been rotating the same half-a-dozen meals week in, week out. Last night I cooked us a particularly poor fajita dish for what must have been the hundredth time in the last few years.

Enough is enough we thought, it’s time to do something about it. While waiting for the morning newspaper we brainstormed all the food we ever cook and came up with a surprisingly long list of around 30 different meals.

This included some long forgotten meals and others that for reasons unfathomed we’d given up on.We then gave them a rating out of five – we are so very bored with the lockdown – against each of the following criteria:

Healthiness

How easy to cook

How much we like them

This led to a surprisingly heated discussion before particularly when it came to discussing the third criteria.

Ignoring the scores completely we then put together a meals plan for the next two weeks which includes the four days off we’ll both be having over Easter. If it weren’t for the virus we’d have been jetting off to Spain for a week but we’re stuck at home self catering rather than eating restaurant cooked paella and tapas.

After some persuasion Mrs Jones agreed that no meal could appear twice in the list as we wanted to avoid over-eating our favourite meals.

We organised the meals so that the harder to cook meals were on Mrs Jones’ non-work days giving us a bit more preparation time. It included some new meals such as a homemade moussaka and a superfood salad like one we had once at a restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean on the south of France.

We’ve also opened a folder for recipes that look interesting that we see online or in the newspapers.

Maybe lots of people do this but it’s a first for us and I’m looking forward to it. What’s on the menu tonight? A click and connect doner kebab from the local chippie!